A long time ago, I offered three free 125×125 ad spots on my sidebar. I updated them manually on a weekly basis, and eventually got rid of them because they were too much of a hassle. Well, I’ve found a new way to offer those spots again, and I just might make a few bucks with it too.

What it it?

A friend of mine introduced me to an interesting ad network: Project Wonderful. They use what they call an ‘infinite auction’ system to accept and place ads. It’s pretty simple how it works: Let’s say I have a 125×125 ad spot available on my site. One of my readers decides they’d like to place their ad there, so they bid $0/day on that spot for one week. As long as nobody bids higher than them, they get that spot all week. Hooray for free ad space.

But how do you make money?

Well, let’s say that two days into that ad being shown, another reader decides that he wants that spot. He’s willing to pay $0.25 per day for the ad, and bids accordingly. Since he’s now the high bidder, he immediately gets control of the ad spot. After 12 hours, the first reader decides that he’s willing to pay for that spot, and bids $1 per day. He gets control of the ad space, and since my other reader only had the spot for 12 hours, it only costs him $0.12 (or half a day at $0.25 per day). If that doesn’t make any sense to you, take a look at their graphical tutorial. It’s an interesting system, and since you’re paying for the time it’s showing (instead of clicks or impressions), it seems to be pretty much fraud-proof.

Oh yeah, they pay via paypal, and the minimum payout is $10. Not bad.

Is it effective?

Prices seem pretty cheap right now. After playing with the search options for a bit, I found a few sites that get tens of thousands of hits per day costing as low as $0.50 per day. Not bad if you want a little exposure (they’re not just limited to 125×125 ad spots either. You can have skyscraper ads, leaderboard ads, etc).

I’m jumping on board

I have no idea why this service hasn’t caught on in the “make money online” blogging niche yet. It seems like most of the big advertisers so far are webcomics. Oh well, I’ve submitted this site for approval, so you should expect to see a few ads pop up in the sidebar within the next week.

Project Wonderful seems to do well for webcomics- but part of the reason it hasn’t broken out of there is probably that most webcomics want to advertise to webcomic readers. If you can find advertisers in another niche, though, I think it’s a great setup.

Wow, my two favorite bloggers put opposing reviews of project wonderful up on the same day. If you are interested, bloggernoob.com a similar sized rss subscriber count (290ish), who updates content daily, just gave it the boot after using it for three months. I recommend reading it.

@Jared
He seems to be more concerned with making money with his ad spots. I’m not so much concerned with making money, rather I’m just glad I’ve found a system that essentially automates the whole finding/publishing process.
Maybe when I have a more respectable number of RSS readers I’ll try to seriously monetize my ad space, but not now.